Tuesday, August 4, 2026

TUESDAY — TECHNOLOGY & WORK

“Expanding broadband infrastructure creates opportunities far beyond internet access.”

— Connie Stewart, Cal Poly Humboldt

ShakeAlert, the nation’s only public earthquake warning system, correctly sizes a large quake about 30% of the time. USGS geophysicists reframed existing fiber-optic broadband as a distributed sensing array and reached 79%, working from the first four seconds of seismic data. Nothing new went into the ground; the gain came from asking what the installed base could also do. To learn more, Check out the article Broadband Cables Are Surprisingly Good at Detecting Earthquakes.

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Stay safe. Stay healthy. Be strong. Lead well.

Chad